


Strays

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:13:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4857575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late one night in the year 2000, Joe West saves Harrison Wells' life. Injured and shaken, Harrison knows no one in Central City, so Joe takes him home. After all, he and Iris have already taken in one traumatized survivor this month: 11-year-old Barry Allen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strays

**Author's Note:**

> A few liberties have been taken with established canon. Harrison and Tess' "accident" now takes place outside Central City, not Starling, and Joe is already a detective.

He looks like Barry sitting there, huddled in a blanket, hair wild, looking much smaller and younger than he really is. Just a month ago, Joe had scooped up a baffled, traumatized little boy and held him tightly. But this one he’s supposed to let go. Someone else’s problem. His own problem, really. There’s an adult under there, an adult who should be fully capable of taking care of himself. Except he’s in the stationhouse past midnight, alone, shivering, and Joe knows exactly the horrors that have brought him here.

“Dr. Wells?”

The kids are waiting at home. Sure, there’s a babysitter and it’s long past their bedtime, but he knows Iris will have snuck into Barry’s room, and they’ll be reading comicbooks by flashlight, listening for him to come back.

“Harrison.” They’ve been through this at least twice tonight. Joe just might have to give in. 

“Is someone coming to pick you up? Someone I can call?”

Harrison pulls the blanket tighter around himself, squinting up at Joe. “No, I… I told you, we’re new in town. Just moved from Starling.”

“But you must know someone.”

“Institutes, business contacts… Tess… Tess dealt with all of that. I don’t really…” Harrison rubs a knuckle hard against his forehead. His glasses had been smashed in the crash. “I had to call her mom. I didn’t even know that number and I must’ve called it a dozen times.”

He’s not hurt, not seriously. The paramedics on the scene had patched up cuts and scratches from all the broken glass, bandaged a twisted knee, but he’s banged up more than anything. Joe had come along at just the right moment to save him from worse. Still, concussions can be nasty, and being shaken up following the night he’s had is more than justified. 

“I can call you a cab. You have an apartment here, don’t you?” Joe had seen the address on some of the endless paperwork he’d filled out earlier. There will be stacks more tomorrow. Reports and interviews. Shoot a guy and you’re in bureaucratic hell forever.

“Yes, but it’s…” Harrison squints again, moves his hand helplessly. “There’s nothing there. All this funding, but it’s for the lab. We were just going to get by like we always did. Sleep on the floor if we had to.”

Goddamn romantics. Joe has to crack half a smile, bittersweet as the whole thing is. Two of the most highly educated people he could ever meet, and they’d been drinking champagne on the beach in the middle of winter, planning to get by on ramen like teenage students rather than thirty-something particle physicists. Joe isn’t totally sure what particle physics is, but it’s one of those things Barry talks about breathlessly, almost choking on cereal in his excitement about protons or whatever.

He checks his watch, already knowing that simply walking away isn’t an option. He clasps Harrison’s shoulder. “Okay, come on. I haven’t got a guest room anymore, but I’ve got a couch, and believe me that’s better than this place.”

“You don’t have to do that, Detective.”

“Joe,” Joe says automatically, and helps the guy to his feet. Or one foot at least. “You think I’m going to leave you to sit here all night with a concussion? You can barely walk or see… And hey, I saved your life. I bet in some culture out there that makes me responsible for you, right?”

“Or some movie,” Harrison adds, and it’s the first halfway lighthearted thing Joe’s heard him say all night.

Joe had been going home the first time, too, relieved to be leaving an out-of-city crime scene that reeked of decomposing bodies. And just as he’d left that crime scene, taking a quiet back road he knew would eventually take him close to his own neighborhood, he’d run straight into another one: an overturned car ahead, one man on his knees, another standing over him, the glint of metal. Joe had slammed on the brakes, grabbed his gun, and shouted for them both to get their hands up. The blond man on his feet had laughed – actually laughed – and brought up what Joe had taken for a gun. Joe had shot him three times in the chest without thinking twice.

It hadn’t been a gun, but everything at the crime scene pointed toward his action being the right call: the spike strip that had been used to slash the tires, taken along with Harrison’s statement about the crazy things the dead guy had been saying. What the metal instrument actually had been was a mystery, but it didn’t look pleasant. The lab guys would figure it out. 

He’d been too late to save Harrison’s wife, Tess Morgan, if there had ever been any chance of saving her at all.

“Coffee?” Joe asks when they get home.

Harrison sits down heavily on the couch, alternately rubbing his knee and the gauze on his forehead. He looks dead tired, but probably won’t sleep until he’s too fatigued not to. His thousand-yard stare probably isn’t all because of the glasses. “No… thank you. I’ll be fine.”

He won’t be, but there isn’t much Joe can do about that. He’s not a little boy Joe can hug and reassure and serve hot cocoa to until daybreak. All Joe can do is find an extra pillow and blanket that probably won’t be used. “I’ll check on you in a few hours. Bathroom’s just over there. In the morning you can take a shower, I’ll find you some clean clothes, and we’ll see about getting your stuff back from Evidence, okay?”

“Yes,” Harrison says. “Okay.”

When Joe comes back down three hours later, Harrison’s puking in the bathroom. Joe raps a knuckle against the door. “Hey. Everything all right?”

The toilet flushes, water runs, and after a moment Harrison opens the door, red-eyed. “She’s gone, Joe,” he says in a whisper, biting his lip white. “She’s gone and I don’t know what to do.”

Age and wisdom be damned. Joe hugs him anyway.

***

The kids are quiet at breakfast, speaking in that Iris-Barry code of glances and eye movements and the touching of elbows and feet. Joe had found the two of them curled up together (he’s going to have to do something about that one of these days, but not _this_ day) and given them the briefest explanation he possibly could about why there was a strange, tearful, bandaged man joining them for breakfast.

“His wife died?” Barry had said, all too predictably. “Maybe it was the man! The man in the lightning!”

Joe had shushed him. “We got the man, Barry. Just an ordinary crazy guy. No lightning, okay?”

A shower might do very little to dull the trauma and fatigue of last night, but Harrison certainly looks better for it, even if Joe’s shirt and pants are baggy on him, the belt pulled through to the last hole. One of them needed to eat more, Joe had concluded. Or less.

Harrison’s even eating a little of the kids’ Cocoa Krispies, not just stirring it around the bowl. Joe makes coffee.

“Um, Dr. Wells?” Barry says, and Joe cringes inside. For the past month he’s been trying to get Barry to talk more, but now isn’t the time to start pestering a poor bereaved man who no doubt still has one hell of a headache. “Joe says you’re a physicist?”

“That’s right.” Harrison’s leaning his head against one hand, but he’s alert enough. And now, in the daylight flooding the kitchen, Joe notices the almost incredible blue of his eyes. Not to mention other things he forces himself not to dwell on, picking out two mugs instead.

“Does that mean all those atoms and things?” Iris says. They haven’t really got to it in school yet, but Barry loves his sci-fi, and some of it’s rubbed off.

“That’s exactly what it means.” Harrison smiles, as if he’s just found two fascinated colleagues, not mostly-clueless middle-schoolers. “Atoms are really, really small things, right? The tiny things that make up everything in the universe. And what I do is look at the even smaller things that make up atoms.”

“And smash them together!” Barry brings his fists together in excitement before Joe can warn him against doing anything semi-violent at the breakfast table.

Harrison’s smile just gets wider. “Well, I haven’t done much smashing yet, but that’s the plan.”

Iris frowns at both of them, with her usual _Neanderthal boys_ expression. “Why would you want to do that? Won’t they just blow up or something?”

“Excellent question, Iris. And yes, that’s a fundamental, yet often neglected part of the plan.”

They’re at it for ten more minutes, the kids half-lying across the table while Harrison sketches things out for them on a mostly-blank leaf of old newspaper that had been lying around. It’s educational, sure, and good for taking Harrison’s mind off things, but they have an actual school to go to and Joe has to usher them off to get their shoes and coats.

“So… you’re a single dad?” Harrison asks while Joe washes up.

Joe glances at his reflection in the window. This is never a line of questioning that goes well. “Yup.”

Harrison, though, just nods, continuing his drawing. Joe rinses out a glass. “Barry’s not… He’s been Iris’ best friend forever. Practically lives here over the holidays, or Iris there. But he lost his mom recently, and his dad’s… not in the picture right now. So…”

“Yeah,” Harrison says, and when Joe wipes off his hands and turns around, Harrison’s watching him with those mesmerizing eyes, never mind he’s half blind and Joe’s probably nothing more than a blur.

Harrison twists his wedding band, tugs at his borrowed shirt. “I’ll get these clothes back to you as soon as I can, once we’ve got all my stuff.”

“Hey, I can do without them for a while, believe me. No rush.” Joe lays his hand on Harrison’s shoulder. “I know things seem awful right now, and they are awful, I’m not going to pretend they’re not. But you’re going to get through this, and you’re going to do all those great things you talked about, and you’re going to make her proud. And someday things will be okay again.”

“They won’t be _okay_ , Joe.” Harrison’s hand is light but firm on his. “I’ll just have redefined what okay is. Which will be hard, and dark, and painful without her.”

There’s a clatter of footsteps down the stairs. “Come on,” Joe says. “Let’s get your things.”

The car might be a write-off, and in any case are impounded for evidence collection, but the bags from the trunk are safe enough. Mostly. 

“Good thing we finished the champagne,” Harrison says, shaking around the shattered remains of two wine glasses in the wicker basket. He sees Joe’s look. “Small bottle.”

All told, it’s not much in the way of belongings for two people who had – Joe assumes – well-paying research jobs for many years. “Our apartment came with furniture,” Harrison explains, stuffing the bags into Joe’s car. “We thought we’d start from scratch. We thought it would be a new beginning for us.” His wedding band catches the light. “We got married the day before yesterday. Just the two of us in a courthouse. Grabbed a couple of people as witnesses. We thought this would all be a great adventure in Central City. Somewhere we could achieve our dreams, raise children, get old together.”

He breathes out, bites his lip, and looks at Joe. “Can I see her?”

“You don’t want to do that.” Joe’s unzipped one of the bags.

“She’s my wife, Joe.”

“Yeah. So you remember her as your wife, as that woman you love, who you drank champagne with on the beach… Everything she was before the accident.” Joe pulls out the glasses case, flips it open. “Here.”

Harrison takes the glasses, wipes them on his shirt, and slips them on. He seems… not so much like a different person, as a different version of the same man, steadier and more focused. “All I’m going to remember is how I couldn’t save her. The one thing she ever needed me to do, and I couldn’t.”

“Harrison.” Joe reaches out and almost takes his cheek, drops his hand to Harrison’s shoulder instead. “You have to understand… I see more death and destruction than almost anyone. And sometimes, no matter how good or strong or fast you are, people can’t be saved. All you can do is honor their memory.”

“Is that what you told Barry?”

“I told him he’s going to make his mom proud, yeah.”

“S.T.A.R. Labs,” Harrison says, which makes no sense until he unfolds the napkin he’s pulled, scrunched up, from his pocket. It’s a better drawing than Joe’s ever done anywhere, that’s for sure. “This is what we were going to build. But I can’t. Not by myself.”

“You’re not by yourself.” Joe gives Harrison’s shoulder a squeeze, but then makes himself let go. “So you hire ten, twenty other people, and maybe all put together they’re half as good as her. You’ll get there. And I know you’ve got at least two willing interns already.”

“I’ll make up name tags.” Harrison rubs his eyes under his glasses. “I guess you could give me a ride to my apartment, then.”

Joe had half-expected the apartment. Not a walk-up, not the worst part of town, but still somewhere students might live. The key fits the door, but no lights turn on. Then again, he doesn’t need lights to see that Harrison hadn’t been exaggerating. The place is absolutely, stunningly empty.

“Well. I’ll call the landlord,” Harrison says while Joe fiddles with the blinds. 

“With what?”

“I’ll ask a neighbor.”

“It’ll be a miracle if you even have running water in this place…” Joe opens the bedroom door, finds nothing different, and looks back at Harrison. At his split lip and baggy clothes, and the old walking stick he’s using, which had once belonged to Joe’s father. “I’m not leaving you here. Let’s go.”

Harrison’s gaze is steady. “I’ll be fine.”

“Sleeping on the floor of an apartment with no heat and no water, in the middle of winter? After all you’ve been through? No. Look, I know my couch and mac & cheese isn’t the Hilton, but it’s better than this.”

“I’m not a helpless child, Joe!”

“No,” Joe says, “you’re not. But you _are_ someone who needs help, and I’m offering it. Because there’s no reason I can think of that it’s better for you to freeze to death in the dark here, and for me to worry about you all night, than for us both to be in a warm house eating our bodyweight in pasta. Which for you, by the way, probably isn’t so much.”

Harrison slumps back against one of many bare white walls. “You just met me,” he says, quiet and dazed.

“Yeah. And Barry can tell you I’m an absolute sucker for taking in cute little strays.” He scoops up the bags by their handles, on too much of a roll to admit they’re really too heavy for one person.

Harrison follows, the front door thunking closed behind him. “Did you just call me cute?”

***

One night turns into two, then a week. While Joe works, Harrison’s on the phone and computer, trying to work out the situation with his apartment while discussing funeral plans with Tess’ mother. And, apparently, doing all the chores he can possibly devise for himself. At night, Joe walks in to find the dishes washed, the trash emptied, the living room tidier than it’s ever been, and the kids diligently doing their homework at the kitchen table. Rather than an awkward guest, he seems to have hired himself a free babysitter, cleaner, and tutor in one.

“Can Harrison stay _forever_?” Barry asks. He’s got some kind of chart spread out across the table, all chemistry that Joe dimly remembers from his own school days. Iris isn’t quite as enthusiastic, but it’s the first time Joe’s ever seen her less than exasperated by math.

“Not forever,” Joe’s careful to say, but the longer Harrison stays, even one day more, the more Joe expects him to be there, making coffee in the morning, doing laundry, taking his turn in the shower… Which he normally does before the rest of the household wakes up, but Joe runs into him once still dripping wet, towel wrapped around his waist. He’s still bruised black and blue, an ugly yellow over his ribs, his knee strapped up. But he’s in better shape than Joe would’ve guessed from his skinny exterior. A _lot_ better shape.

Eventually, Harrison flies back to Tess’ hometown for the funeral, with no promise about when he’ll be back. His bags lie stacked up by the couch, and although Barry trips over them twice, no one suggests moving them. Iris snaps at least one pencil out of frustration over math homework. Barry tries running to Iron Heights again. Life continues much as it had before, but Harrison’s absence reveals just how comparatively bleak that life had been. Who knew that a broken, grieving man could bring so much life into a home?

Then one evening, two weeks later, the doorbell rings and Iris squeals with delight as Joe, reading on the couch, clenches one fist and _hopes_.

“Hey Joe,” Harrison says.

He looks good for a man who’s been to a funeral and spent all his time looking after Tess’ mom. His face has healed up, he’s walking without much of a limp, and he doesn’t protest when the kids tackle him with tight hugs. Joe wants to do exactly the same thing. Wants to do more. But he just cracks open a beer for both of them, and they sit talking until the wee hours.

“Think I can use your couch for a few more days?” Harrison asks. They’ve stacked up the bottles, and Joe hadn’t honestly considered anything different. “I’ll get this apartment sorted out. I have to get the lab up and running. But…”

Joe drops the pillow and blanket in his lap. “It’s yours. Rent-free.”

The few more days stretches out, as Joe had known it would. Harrison is doing _something_ with his work, using the computer, sketching and writing his way through stacks of paper. At night, when Joe prizes the kids away from the keyboard, he sees some of it: addresses, equations, and pictures of her. It’s not that he wants to snoop on Harrison, but the man is living on his couch, in a fragile state of mind. And the drawings are intricately, painfully beautiful. Not like the night Harrison and Joe had pulled her bloodied body from the wreck and tried to save her, knowing she was already gone. The more Joe learns about Tess Morgan, the more incredible she seems.

“I almost went to art school once,” Harrison says when he finds Joe admiring sketches of Tess, the kids, the imagined future lab.

“Why didn’t you?”

Harrison shrugs, leans into the doorframe. “High school crush. I wouldn’t have been going for the right reasons. Of course… their last painting went for a hundred thousand at auction, so what do I know?”

Many nights Joe is tired, exhausted by the time he gets home, and falls straight to sleep the first moment he can. But other nights he lies and thinks about the man nestled among blankets downstairs, reading by lamplight. Thinks about his blue eyes and lean body. About the way it would feel to touch him. And then he has to turn over and force those thoughts away, because the poor man just lost his wife, is barely keeping it together, and in any case would never be interested. Would, if anything, run away and keep running if he had any idea what Joe thought about him in the depths of night.

Harrison does run, in fact. Every morning, once his knee lets him, he’s out jogging around the neighborhood in brisk, cold air before anyone else in the house is half awake. Joe’s found Barry watching him through the window with awe: “Can I go out with him?”

“You’ve done enough running, Bar. Eat your breakfast.”

And Harrison comes, wiping sweat and condensation from his glasses, and asks them to save him some eggs while he takes a shower.

One Thursday, the desk phone rings at the station, and Fred Chyre picks it up, tosses the receiver across to Joe. “Your boyfriend.”

Joe hasn’t exactly mentioned Harrison to his colleagues, or hadn’t meant to, but it had all come out from a dozen innocent questions about who was looking after the kids or how that shooting investigation was going… Not that Chyre cares. At least, not enough to do anything about it. Besides, there’s always been a rumor or two floating around about Joe’s private life.

“Barry didn’t come home after soccer,” Harrison says. Joe can picture him running his fingers back through his already-tousled hair. “And Iris is… not being helpful.”

“Iron Heights,” Joe says. “He’s trying to see his dad.”

“Iron Heights. That’s _miles_ away.”

Joe grabs the keys to the squad car. “Take the car outside. Keys are on the kitchen table. Iris can tell you the way. I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay.”

“Harrison? You’re all right to drive?”

A pause. “I’m fine, Joe. I’ll see you soon.”

It feels like a long, long time before he can weave his way out of rush-hour traffic jams and get there, praying that there hasn’t been any accident, that Barry hadn’t gotten lost or accepted a ride from a stranger. But there they are in the parking lot: Barry in his familiar red hoodie sitting up on the trunk with Harrison’s arm around him. Safe and sound.

“He got all the way here by himself,” Harrison says brightly once Joe’s out of the car. “I think I’ll put him in for a 5K.”

“That’s nothing to be proud of. Do you know how worried I was? How worried we all were?”

“I just want to see my dad!” Barry yells back. His face almost matches his sweatshirt.

Harrison has a hand on each of their arms. “Since we’re here, Joe. Maybe it’s for the best.”

He could so easily turn on both of them, and on Iris too, for almost certainly knowing what Barry was doing and not trying to stop him. But Barry and Harrison are so alike, with their earnestness, their good intentions… “This isn’t a good idea,” he says, already knowing he’ll have to say yes, no matter what Henry asked him to do.

The visit goes exactly as expected: Barry in tears, Henry ashamed and disappointed.

“Who’s Harrison?” Henry asks once Barry’s gone.

Joe hasn’t wanted a conversation with Henry in a long, long time. “A friend.”

“A _serious_ friend?”

Sometimes Henry knows him far too well. “A _good_ friend,” Joe says quietly. “I’m taking care of Barry. You’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

He’s known Harrison for a few months, and he trusts him with the kids, the house, the car. His cop instincts about people are usually right. Yet he’d known Henry and Nora for how many years, believing them to be the highest possible standard for good, honest people, and been repaid for that trust by finding Nora dead and Henry covered in her blood. Still. Harrison’s a better bet than a bored teenage babysitter from a few houses over.

“You can’t keep sleeping on the couch,” he says once Barry has run angrily upstairs and Iris has followed him, rolling her eyes. 

Harrison nods, adjusting his glasses. “I know you’re mad, Joe. I shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

“I’m not mad.” Which is a phrase almost universally spoken by people boiling over with fury. “You were right. It’s the only thing that was going to stop all this running off and keep Barry safe.”

“Still.”

“Still, next time we might talk about it before we take sides in front of the kids.”

Harrison’s nodding, fiddling with the edge of his folded-up blanket on the couch arm. “I know I’m not anyone’s parent. I’m just a guest. And I’m sorry.”

Joe hangs up his coat and studies Harrison: on paper the guy’s a couple of years older than Joe himself. But he’s got his head in the clouds and his feet knocked out from under him. Barry, again. 

“This situation’s ridiculous, Harrison. Someone at the station left around one of those fancy pop-science magazines, and you were in it, you and Tess. You’re not just some geeky goof. These people say you’re a genius. The next Einstein and Bill Gates and that Apple guy rolled into one. And you’re staying on my couch because your apartment’s a joke? You’re supposed to be the director of a billion-dollar research facility. A billion dollars! I don’t know what a billion dollars is going to buy you, but it’s a whole lot more than one couch.”

“It’s all just theory, Joe.” Harrison looks the way Iris does when Joe asks her to explain hair products. “I don’t have a billion dollars. Tess and I had some ideas, ideas various institutions, companies, even the military were interested in. We thought we could make some money, build the lab I showed you, the particle accelerator… Maybe if everything went perfectly it would happen. But Tess was smarter than me, and she was the one who could get things done. I just had the crazy ideas. Most of which were exactly that.”

“And I bet some of them weren’t. I know she’s not here anymore and I know how hard that must be. But you’re not doing right by her or yourself by giving up. So I need you to try, Harrison. And I need you off my couch.”

Harrison sweeps off his glasses and rubs his forehead. “Okay. All right. I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.”

“Hold up, Doctor. I said I need you off the couch, not out of the house. You think I’m turning down a free tutor and nanny? Barry can burn off some of his energy clearing out that junk room upstairs and we can get you an actual bed. There’s no way that couch is doing your back any favors.”

Harrison squints at him, replaces his glasses, and squints again. “You really want me living here? Long-term?”

“I think it’s good for you. I think it’s good for us. But if you get that billion dollars, you can start paying rent.”

***

Harrison doesn’t get a billion dollars, so far as Joe knows, but he buys a car and a new suit, and leases lab space somewhere downtown. And he doesn’t pay rent, but he starts buying groceries and making dinner, because whatever he does all day, he’s always back in time to watch the kids when they wander in after sports training or photography club.

“Got yourself a pretty little wife there,” Fred Chyre remarks more than once, whenever Harrison drops by the station with lunch burritos (“If I’m buying for me, I might as well get two.”).

It’s such an obviously ridiculous thing to say. Harrison turns out pretty nicely in a suit and looks like any other businessman about town, not to mention he’s got more than a few inches on Fred. But they spend most of Joe’s breaks talking about the kids, about dinner, about all the domestic things most cops would be embarrassed to discuss. And it doesn’t matter that it’s a new millennium and there are more openly-LGBT cops on the force than ever before. Doesn’t even matter that Harrison still wears his wedding ring. Joe can’t help but feel a little embarrassed by it himself.

And yet… Looking up from his desk after hours of examining crime scenes, doing paperwork, taking phone calls, and seeing Harrison, with his windblown hair and bright smile? If he’s going to have some pseudo-boyfriend awarded to him by squad rumors, it might as well be the tall, handsome, unbelievably sweet one with the genius intellect.

“How come you don’t come in here and use your crazy math skills to help us solve crimes like those guys on TV?” Joe demands one such lunch break while Harrison sits on his desk, flipping through reports.

“The butler did it,” Harrison says, and winks, wiping sauce from his mouth. “I’m solving mysteries every day, Joe. Just not these ones.”

“How about where all our socks go?”

“I’ve got a theory on that. But in the meantime I’m just buying more.” He drops down onto his feet and starts jamming wrappers into the trash. “Do you think you’ll be free tomorrow? And the kids?”

Joe sits back in his chair, kicking his feet up onto the desk. “Doesn’t Barry have a science fair at the school?” Barry and Harrison have been conspiring on weekends and evenings for weeks now. Joe’s pretty sure he’s going to wake up one morning to find a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

“That’s next week.”

“Okay, then I guess we’re free. What’s up?”

Harrison smiles. He looks like a gleeful twelve-year-old when he does. “I want to show you guys something.”

The _something_ turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. Just an immense dirt lot by the river. The kind of place that gets left to accumulate trash – and the occasional corpse – because it’s unsound for prime real estate. Iris prods Harrison in the thigh. She’d brought her camera for _this_? “What are we looking at?”

“The heart of the city!” Harrison’s got his boots and jeans on, which are a bit better fit than his suit for this kind of territory. He spreads his arms out wide. “The heart of the nation, if I get my way.”

Barry and Joe share a look. “Not sure your geography’s as good as your physics, Doctor.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong.” Harrison pulls the napkin from his back pocket. _The_ napkin. “S.T.A.R. Labs. Right here.”

“Right here?” Barry’s got a tone of wonder in his voice already. He’s got a better imagination than Joe does, but probably nowhere near as good as Harrison’s.

“Right here?” Joe echoes. “Here. This is yours?”

Harrison cocks his head. “Mine? Well. It’s owned by various… Anyway, the point is that we’re building it. Sure, it’ll take a while before even the first wing is operational, but we’ve got the other lab to work from. By the time the kids are in college, we’ll be up and running.”

“The particle accelerator?” Barry’s eyes may never have been wider. 

“Working on it, yes. I’m not sure we’ll get it operational before you’re thirty.”

Barry is suddenly less impressed. “But that’s _forever_.”

“It’ll go by faster than you think, Bar.”

Iris sighs and takes a few photos of the area, as well as the three of them. Later, Harrison sticks them to the fridge together with the six-pointed logo he’s designed, a logo that seems to pop up on a lot of things very quickly, from magazine covers to billboards at the site, to the stacks of t-shirts Harrison brings home. 

“It’s all branding,” Harrison says, eating a mound of eggs for breakfast. His own t-shirt seems to be at least a size too small. Or maybe his biceps are getting bigger. “The investors like it, and it builds team unity. Anyway, it’s a tiny piece of the puzzle.”

“Uh huh.” Joe sips at his morning coffee and turns over to the sports news.

He’s not actively trying to avoid news about the lab. That would be impossible, the way Barry interrogates Harrison over dinner every night, the way half their laundry these days seems to bear the S.T.A.R. Labs brand in all colors of the rainbow. But he doesn’t go looking for it either. Doesn’t visit Harrison at what he imagines must be a maze of labyrinthine white corridors, populated by identikit scientists in their goggles and lab coats. He’d encouraged Harrison to follow the dream and finish what he’d once started with Tess, but it’s not Detective Joe West’s place to start messing around in the hallowed hallways where only PhDs should tread.

Plus, with every success, every patent, every interview, and every bit of progress at the site by the river, the day Harrison will leave comes a little bit closer.

“You took off your ring,” he says, as offhandedly as he can manage, in the spring. He’d noticed the first day, always noticed everything about Harrison, but it was a tough subject to broach, and worse for a detective who automatically made everyone feel like they were under suspicion.

Harrison pops the cap off a beer and hands it to him. “Seemed like time, you know? I miss her… I miss her every day. But we’re moving forward. Everything’s got to go on, right? And me too.”

“Right.”

He’d been worried about Harrison at Christmas, his first without Tess, but probably the kids had got him through it, with the fairy lights and the tree, and the cupcakes that always seemed to be freshly baked whenever Joe walked in the door. 

“I’m going to put on twenty pounds this Christmas,” he’d complained, tugging at his belt.

Harrison, his glasses fogged up, had only grinned. “You look great, Joe. And this is the one thing I know how to bake, so you’d better enjoy them.”

On the day itself, Harrison had gone to early-morning mass – the first time Joe had known him to say or do anything religious at all. “Old habits,” Harrison had shrugged, although he was also tenser than Joe had seen him in months. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

When he came back they’d all watched a lot of cartoons and old movies, and eaten far too much. None of which – not even Harrison and Barry’s touch football game with the neighborhood kids in the park – had distracted Joe from how red and cried-out Harrison’s eyes were.

But he’d been fine since. Better than fine. If anything, Joe was the one worn out by the job, kept out nights, with pay raises tied up with red tape in some bureaucrat’s office. Too many times he came home in the late, cold hours, with boots caked in mud, smelling of formaldehyde or worse. The kids would be in bed, but Harrison would pad downstairs in his boxers, pulling on a t-shirt, and they’d chat over re-heated pizza.

It’s been a little over a year, and Joe honestly doesn’t know what he’d do without him.

Tonight is a college baseball night, and Iris is at a sleepover with some girlfriends. Harrison had brought in two bags full of Chinese takeout cartons, apologizing for being so late. But Barry’s still upstairs anyway, frowning over an English paper.

“How was your day?” Harrison asks, cracking open his own beer and rummaging around for chopsticks.

“Not too bad, I guess.” It was bad. He _aches_ and he wishes he could blame it on getting older – although that wouldn’t make him feel much better – but Harrison bounds around like a goddamn Labrador puppy at all hours.

Harrison sits down. Joe’s nabbed the middle couch cushion out of habit. “Listen,” Harrison says, “I’ve been meaning to… I can’t help but think I’m cramping your style.”

Joe blinks at him. “My style.”

“Yeah, your…” Harrison glances toward the stairs. No sign of Barry yet. “I was talking to Tina today about, you know, relationships, and it occurred to me that you’ve never brought, you know, a friend home.”

“A friend.”

“Joe. I don’t need to spell it out.”

Joe could ask a lot of things, like why Harrison is talking to Tina McGee about relationships, and why he might worry about Joe’s sex life, but mainly the question comes as a surprise to him too. Because he’s never thought about bringing anyone home. Harrison’s already here. “You think you’re the problem?” He waves his bottle at the stairs. “I’ve got two nosy pre-teens in this house who have to investigate every single sound. At least with you I could put a sock on the door.”

Harrison nods and laughs. “Sure.”

“And what about you?” Joe raises a placating hand before Harrison can open his mouth. “I know, I know. It’s too soon. But one day it won’t be.”

“Well,” Harrison says, as Barry finally arrives, “I _am_ still paying rent on that apartment.”

“Which has no bed in it.”

“Then my romantic interests will be strictly limited to everyone who’s fine with sleeping bags and carpet burn.”

“Good luck with that on Craigslist.”

Even though there’s no Iris with them tonight, there’s nothing better than being in the familiar warmth of the living room while the announcers debate the records of outfielders and Barry and Harrison swap cartons back and forth, poking each other with chopsticks and dropping the occasional dumpling on Joe’s plate.

Joe lays a hand on each of their backs. “Good to be at home with my boys,” he says. 

And though neither one of them is his boy, they both smile back at him.

***

The newspaper comes just before Thanksgiving, early in the morning while Barry’s out running with Harrison. Their runs have been starting earlier lately, as they take off for the nearest large park. Harrison’s determined to get Barry in good shape for his cross-country meets, and he must be doing well if he can keep up with Harrison. Barry’s had a bit of a growth spurt, but he’s still only twelve.

Harrison sometimes brings home clippings of magazine articles – laughing over mentions of S.T.A.R. Labs projects and any attempts to describe him as ‘enigmatic’. “Do I seem enigmatic to you?”

“Only in the sense that I never understand a word you’re saying.”

Even Iris has interviewed Harrison for her school newspaper. This is the first time there’s been a profile of him in the Central City Picture News, though. Not an interview, but something trying to stir up a story where there isn’t one. Clearly no one can embark on any kind of major project in this town without having deep, dark motivations. There’s the usual crap about the chances of opening up a black hole, and slightly more sane crap about the lab’s money coming from business and military interests. (“Less and less, once we get running,” Harrison says. It’s one of his major concerns too. “But I can’t build the facility with pocket money.”)

And then there’s…

“One of the most curious aspects of the Harrison Wells persona is his living situation,” Joe reads aloud as Harrison walks in, breathless and mopping his forehead with a towel. “In his mid thirties, feted as one of the world’s greatest minds, and named as one of Central City’s most eligible bachelors – I didn’t know that – Wells chooses to rent a modest room from the detective who investigated the murder of his late fiancée.”

Harrison very rarely seems any more dangerous than a slightly disappointed puppy, but with his glasses off, wiping them dry, his vivid blue eyes look more than deadly.

Joe glances back down. Clears his throat. “Detective Joseph West, a decorated police officer and single father, is also known in the city for his connection to the Nora Allen murder, and has become the legal guardian of the Allens’ young son, Barry…”

“I’m calling my lawyer,” Harrison says. “There’s no reason to poke into my private life, and if they’re going to harass the kids I’ll damn well harass them right back.”

“Hey.” Joe takes his wrist. “No one’s harassing anyone. I’ll have a quiet word with this writer, but it’s just the same old tripe they regurgitate on slow news days.”

Harrison pushes sweat-soaked hair back out of his eyes. “We’ve barely begun construction, and this is already happening. I understand why famous people become recluses in giant isolated mansions, and I’m not even famous.”

“You’re one of Central City’s most eligible bachelors!” Joe pings a finger against the newspaper on the table.

“I’m as much that as I am one of the world’s greatest minds. God, why does anyone care about _me_? They should focus on the breakthroughs Martin Stein’s making, or Tina’s projects at Mercury. Tina’s beautiful, and she’s got all that English sophistication working for her. I’m just-”

Joe gives his wrist a squeeze. “You’re Harrison Wells. Our own home-grown star.”

Harrison rolls his eyes just a little, and slides his glasses back on. “You know I’m from Canada. I have a work visa.”

“I wasn’t talking about the U.S.” Joe winks. “Listen. The second anyone starts approaching Barry or Iris, or hanging around outside, or printing straight-up slander about you? I will have the whole city police force sitting on top of them. But for now all you have to worry about is getting those kids to stop taking an hour each in the bathroom.”

As if on cue, Barry wails from the top of the stairs: “Iriiiiiiis! I gotta pee!”

“Ah, my enigmatic life.” Harrison drops into a chair and skewers up a pancake. “I wish it was all I had to worry about. I meant to tell you… I’ve been invited to this gala _thing_ Mercury’s holding next week. I’m not big on high-society events, but the right publicity is important. Anyway, I was hoping you’d go with me.”

“Go with you?” Joe has images of tuxedos and evening gowns, and lots of impenetrable discussions about the Boson-Higgs, or whatever seems adorable when Harrison’s explaining it to Barry, and not-so-adorable when anyone else is leading the conversation. “I don’t think that’s my natural environment.”

“Nor mine. But there’ll be dinner and champagne, and you’ll get to meet some of my friends.”

It’s certainly true that not many leading scientists show up at the station. “You’d have more fun without me. Why don’t you take Tina?”

“Tina? I assume she’ll be going with her partner. I’m not going to twist your arm, Joe. I just thought it might be fun for us to have a night out without the kids for once. Pretend to be adults.”

“That’s the thing,” Joe says. “We’re only good at doing that if there’s a twelve-year-old in the room. Actually, hey, maybe you should take Barry.”

Harrison pauses so they can listen to the increasingly more urgent thumping on the bathroom door. “I love Barry, but I’m not taking him to a gala dinner. I want to take you, Joe.”

“Then it’s a date.” Joe pushes his chair back and turns away, toward the stairs, before Harrison can say anything else or before he can take it back. “Iris, you better open that door before I open it for you!”

***

As much as Harrison’s not a born society schmoozer, Joe feels even less so. He’s been to plenty of fancy houses and events in Central City, but always on investigations, or in his younger days as security waiting for something to go wrong at a public function. If it meant dragging out the mayor in handcuffs, he could do it without a flicker of fear. Standing around holding a cocktail, listening to tales of advanced research? Really not his thing. But there will probably be dozens of people in the same situation, right? Other bored, baffled dates brought by their genius husbands and wives…

Which is the whole question, isn’t it? Whether it’s a date, whether Harrison wants it to be a date. Or is he just the default option for a man without an actual significant other, the best friend Harrison wants to hide behind if things get too stressful on the business front. Tess had always been the practical one, Harrison liked to say, and while he seems to have been handling that admirably so far, Joe still finds him biting his lip and chewing fingernails over financial reports.

“This is so unfair,” Iris says on the night. She’s got Barry by her side, nodding at every word. “We’re not babies. We’re not going to burn the house down.”

“Burn the house down? No way. You two are _much_ more inventive than that. We’ll probably see the mushroom cloud straight across town.”

The babysitter – the walking, talking bone of contention – is sitting on the couch, playing with her phone.

“I’m sure they’ll be asleep, Joe.” Harrison is looking far, _far_ too handsome in his new suit, looping his blue tie into a knot. His PR assistant had picked it out, he’d explained, which was the first Joe had heard of him even _having_ a PR assistant.

“It’s seven thirty! On a Friday!”

Joe brushes off his jacket yet again. It’s not going to get any cleaner. Mostly because it’s brand new and never had one speck of dirt on it in the first place. “Some great debate skills there, baby. Why don’t you practice them on Barry. _Upstairs_.”

“What?!” Barry says, alarmed.

Iris glares. “You are the _worst_ dads ever!”

“The _worst_!” Barry echoes.

“Well, looks like you’ve been adopted,” Joe says when they finally get into the back of the cab that’s been waiting, abandoning the babysitter to her fate.

Harrison pauses while putting on his seatbelt. “Joe… I’d never presume to-”

“Oh, you think you have a _choice_ about it?”

“I have to say, it _is_ kind of strange, when Barry and Iris are with me at the lab, to tell people they’re my friend’s kids.” Harrison meets his eyes, and ducks his head shyly again. “I mean, obviously they are, and I wouldn’t-”

Joe stretches out, laying his arm across Harrison’s shoulders. “I’m not an expert in what a family’s supposed to be in this day and age. But I think whatever we’ve got counts. Iris could use another parent. And Barry doesn’t seem to mind a third dad. If you don’t mind having a couple of kids.”

“I’ve had a couple of kids for a couple of years, Joe.” Harrison stirs, taking the event flier from his inside jacket pocket. “But it’s good to have a night out, just the two of us.”

“And a couple of hundred people with more letters after their names than you do, Doctor.”

“None of whom are more intimidating than you, Detective.”

Joe sighs and checks his watch. “I should’ve brought my gun.”

The event is exactly like he’d expected and feared it would be. Other than Harrison, the only person he knows is Dr. Tina McGee, who shakes his hand with a “Joseph, how lovely!” and what might be a sly smile. He can’t ever figure out whether English people are being snooty and condescending, or if that’s simply the way they always talk. Either way, no one’s called him “Joseph” in years, unless they were reading it off a screen at the DMV.

Little gaggles of adoring fans form around certain people in the room. “Martin Stein,” Harrison says, gesturing toward a silver-haired older man holding court in one corner. “Even I don’t understand the full implications of his research.”

Harrison does his best to introduce Joe to the people who swarm him – some of them his own employees and collaborators, as well as old friends from Starling City – but it’s evident that no one cares a tenth as much about Joe as they do about Harrison. And, surrounded by his natural audience, it’s easy to see why. Harrison’s pure idealism and excitement can infect people fifty feet away. Joe plucks the empty champagne flute from his hand and escapes the crush.

“Isn’t he something?” A voice beside him asks, as Joe finds two new glasses and turns back. 

The suit is immaculate and expensive, even Joe can tell that much, but its wearer is a good ten or fifteen years younger than anyone else in the room. The nerdy glasses seem a little bit at odds with his fashion tastes.

“He’s something all right.” And seeing it like this makes that _something_ hit home more than Harrison’s professional successes or his name in the paper, both of which Joe’s tried to keep at arm’s length from their cozy domestic life.

Joe glances at the glass in the boy’s hand as he knocks it back. “Aren’t you a little young for that?” He’s not going to bust the kid, but he can hardly say nothing.

The boy shoots him a look. “I’m Hartley Rathaway,” he says, as if that explains everything. Which, knowing the Rathaways, it probably does. “And you’re his bit of rough trade. S.T.A.R. Labs always does say it’s a meritocracy. They’ll take _anyone_ if you can do the job.” Hartley’s eyes drift down Joe’s suit. “And I hope you can do the job. Because _that_ man’s a star.”

Harrison catches up with him before dinner, long after Hartley’s drifted off to find someone else to antagonize. “Hello! Where did you disappear to?”

“Just mingling,” Joe says. “Having fun?”

The meal is not exactly the standard fare at the West family home, and it’s probably for the best that Harrison hadn’t brought Barry, who would’ve spent the entire time moving things around his plate. Joe’s tempted to do the same thing, but the other option is to try to engage in conversation.

And the conversation continues and continues. Harrison must have snuck in a Red Bull or two, because he keeps talking – to Tina, to Stein, to old friends, to people angling for a job – until way past when Joe had thought they’d be home. He phones the babysitter to check that everything’s okay, but of course Barry and Iris are way too smart to make any noise while they read comics or play cards or whatever else two kids might feel obliged to do close to midnight.

“I’m so sorry,” Harrison says finally, when Joe’s sipping the last of the scotch he’d ordered from the after-dinner bar. “I lost track of the time.”

“It’s okay. Looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

Harrison’s still frowning, loosening his tie. “I didn’t bring you here hoping you’d be bored. I’ll make it up to you. Bowling next weekend?”

“You’re a bit of a superstar at that, too.”

“Well you can crush me at flag football if you like. Literally.”

Central City at midnight is something Joe’s seen far too many times, but mostly from the inside of a cop car. Not often has he stood on the plaza outside Mercury Labs with the guy who, from a purely objective point of view, might just be the most handsome man in the city. It’s amazing there aren’t any physics groupies still hanging around. Joe even looks around for the Rathaway kid, but they’re alone.

“Harrison…” he says while Harrison stuffs his necktie in his jacket pocket, not really sure what he means to say next.

Harrison yawns and stretches before wrapping his arms tightly around himself. “What are we doing, Joe?”

“Catching a cab, if we’re ever going to get home.”

Harrison raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

Joe studies him, scratching his jaw. “You didn’t mean that.”

“No, I didn’t.”

This is _not_ the place to be doing this, out in the cold, in public – although there’s no public – with the slight fear that a wrong answer will mean Harrison just walks off into the night forever. But then, there’s been no right place to do it. No right time. It’s always seemed too soon after Tess passed, or the kids have been around, or they’ve both been busy with work. And he’s been scared. Because trying for any kind of new beginning means the end of something else. One glance at their household could tell you that. A whole family of strays who no one would take in but each other.

“I introduced you as my friend in there, Joe. But there wasn’t a single person who didn’t assume we were lovers. I would think the same thing. I know you would. Two adult, unrelated, employed men living together for years, raising kids together? Come on, Joe. No one needs to be a detective to figure that one out.” 

“Sometimes even detectives are wrong.” How often has he looked past Harrison’s ajar bedroom door and wished he could slip into bed beside him, take that slender body in his arms, feel Harrison sleepily stirring, kissing him? It’s the fantasy that everyone else already thinks is true.

“But I wish they were right. I wish all of them were right.” Harrison pulls off his glasses and combs his fingers roughly through his hair. “I don’t know if that makes you uncomfortable. I really don’t. And I don’t want to lose what we have now, but-”

“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.” What makes him uncomfortable is seeing Harrison getting anxious again. Joe takes a step forward. “Listen… It hasn’t been so long since you went through something hugely, horribly traumatic, and I can’t imagine how strong you’ve been just to get out of bed in the morning, so-”

Harrison smiles, shaking his head. “I wasn’t strong for a moment, Joe. You were strong for me. For all of us.”

Joe pauses. Harrison’s eyes are so very, very, fixatingly blue. “I want to make sure that this isn’t happening for the wrong reasons.”

“Because you saved me that night? You took me in, you’ve supported me all this time… But no, I don’t love you because you saved my life. If anything, it was harder for me to stay. Seeing you every day reminded me of what had happened. When you shot that guy. When we tried to save Tess. But you make me feel safe, Joe. You always have.”

“Safe’s good.”

Harrison bites his lip and slides his glasses back on. “Do you know how many times we’ve gone to lunch, or the park, or shopping, and I’ve been halfway to holding your hand? Or the times I’ve wanted to introduce you as… I don’t know what, but something more than my friend. Tina’s my friend. We’re more than that.”

Joe flexes his fingers. His body’s gone stiff and awkward, in a way he never is around anyone, much less Harrison. “You were married,” he says, just as stiffly and awkwardly.

“And I know you don’t like to talk about it, but Iris had a mom. Things change. Or they don’t change so much. I almost went to _art school_ , Joe. You think I’ve never liked a boy before?”

“ _Hey_ ,” Joe says, in the same tone he uses when Barry whines about watching “girly” movies, but he can feel himself relax, like someone’s just turned on the heat in the world.

Harrison bunches up his hands in his pockets and turns, looking around the street. “So. Okay. It’s late. We should probably get a cab.”

“In a minute,” Joe says.

He wishes he could record, somehow, just how Harrison’s cheeks feel under his palms, how Harrison’s tiny gasp of surprise almost instantly turns into a laugh, and how exactly their bodies press together, arms winding around each other. It’s been so long since Joe kissed anyone, he’d worried it might be a skill you forget, but Harrison’s mouth, his lips, his tongue… It might not be a perfect-10 kiss on anyone’s scale, but it’s the only one either of them needs right now. With the surge of adrenaline, Joe feels like he’s in freefall. But the good kind of freefall. The type where you have a parachute that probably works.

“We should, uh…” There are two possible endings to that thought, and he doesn’t want either of them right now. He wants to stand here exactly like this, feeling Harrison’s breath on his face, seeing the way Harrison’s looking at him and not having to second-guess what any of it might mean.

They could go to a hotel. The babysitter’s probably dozing on the couch anyway, and the kids have to knock themselves out _sometime_. He can’t, _can’t_ get this tiny hint of new discovery and not explore it further. He wants to get Harrison out of that suit, for starters.

“You’ll worry all night if we don’t go home,” Harrison says, leaning into him. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

He holds Harrison’s hand on the ride home, deliberately not thinking about what might happen when they get there, and just focusing on Harrison’s skin, his warmth, the reassuring squeezes. He’s _not_ supposed to be nervous. Kids get nervous. Harrison gets nervous. Joe can breeze through armed face-offs with known killers. _Oh God._

“Do you think they’re awake?” Harrison asks, looking up the stairs while Joe makes coffee. The babysitter, who lives just three doors down, has already sleepwalked out with a pretty generous extra tip.

“Those kids can sleep through a hurricane or wake up at a pin drop. Hard to say.”

Harrison hangs his jacket on the back of a dining room chair. “Do you think that they… That they’d be surprised? About us?”

“We’re both way, way too old for them to care about anything except that we don’t do icky kissing stuff in front of them. You know what they’re going to care about? What we use your room for once you move in with me. Because I know Barry’s angling for a little lab of his own.”

“Ohhh, a lab.” And there goes Harrison’s imagination. “That’s a great idea. I mean, I’ve got more labs than anyone could ever want, but I’d have _loved_ that when I was his age. Someplace to experiment without worrying about making a mess.”

Joe sets down his coffee mug. “I was hoping you might focus more on the part about you moving in with me.”

Harrison’s fiddling with his hair again. “I don’t know. You’re a terrible snorer, and I’ve been told I talk in my sleep…”

“Did I say anything about sleeping?”

There’s not the faintest sound from either of the kids’ rooms – something that’s in itself suspicious – but Joe isn’t going to start investigating now. If only the house was bigger, with thicker walls, and about twenty rooms between his and Barry’s. At least there’s a door he can shut. And a superstar scientist he can push against the door.

“You’re going to change the world,” Joe says, already unbuttoning Harrison’s shirt. “We’re not going to be too boring for you?”

Harrison has a firm grip on his belt, pulling him in closer. “If there’s any kind of _we_ , Joe, I’m part of it.”

“Yeah,” Joe says. “Yeah, you are.”

Their breathing seems incredibly, surreally loud afterward, lying in the darkness, as Joe listens for any sound of traumatized children. All he can really hear is Harrison’s heartbeat under his ear. They hadn’t been loud, had they? They’d probably been as near-silent as two people discovering each other’s bodies for the first time, making love for the first time, could ever hope to be. And yet he’s still so on edge that even Harrison’s blissed-out sigh of contentment makes him jump.

“Hey…” Harrison curls an arm around him. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Joe nestles closer. Okay has never felt so good before.

***

In the morning, after Harrison and Barry get back from their run with mud splashed up to their knees, they make pancakes. Prior experience has banned Barry from trying to flip anything, but Iris nails it every time, to rapturous applause. Harrison has his sketchbook by him on the table, as he sips orange juice and doodles. The man can genuinely draw something more beautiful before breakfast than Joe could accomplish in a lifetime.

“We’re framing that one,” he says, leaning in over Harrison’s shoulder. There are pictures of all of them in that book somewhere, along with Tess and the lab. But here they are together, maybe for the first time: Harrison lean and lanky in his glasses, Joe with his beanie and arms that probably aren’t that big in real life, Barry wielding test tubes, Iris with her pen and notebook at the ready.

“I can do better.”

“We can frame those too. Iris, I think that’s enough flipping, baby. Bar, where did you stick the maple syrup last time?”

Joe strokes his hand down over Harrison’s hair while the kids try to open all the cabinets at once. No more pulling away. No more wondering. When he touches his lips to Harrison’s, he expects a chorus of “eww!” and giggling from the kids. What he gets, when he lifts his head to check that they haven’t both spontaneously turned to stone, are two identical, knowing grins.

“Dad, do you want the Mickey Mouse one? I made a Jupiter for you, Harrison.”

Barry groans. “ _Saturn_ ’s the one with the rings.”

“I _know_ that. But this is Jupiter. From an alternate universe. Harrison said that’s totally possible, right?”

“Totally possible. But actually, Iris, Jupiter has rings in this universe too. Did you know, the _Voyager_ probe…”

Not so long ago, this had been as far out of reach for each one of them as it possibly could ever be. So far that Joe wasn’t sure that anything much existed beyond him and Iris just holding on to each other, because there was no one else who wanted or needed them. But then Barry had come to them out of one tragedy, and Harrison from another. And damn if he couldn’t tear up over it, having Barry enthusiastically squirting syrup all over the pancake solar system Harrison’s trying to explain. Not just because he’d taken in these two beautiful souls, but because they’d taken him and Iris in too. And held on tightly.

Joe’s going to keep holding on.


End file.
